Vacancy & Ariel

by Lucius Shepard

  Baffled, I fumbled in my jacket pocket. “Who’re you gonna call?”

  “Just give it to me!”

  She held the phone so I could see her punch the buttons and dialed the number written on the card, omitting the area code. “Two,” she said. “That’s A. Five. That’s K. Four. That’s H. Four again. That’s I. Do you see it? Eight. That’s T. Two. Another A. Four. I.”

  I had spelled the word out before she finished.

  Akhitai.

  “Maybe it’s just…” I let the sentence trail off.

  “What? A coincidence?” She snatched the card from me and pointed at the tiny symbol printed in the corner. “What did you think this was?”

  “The ‘at’ sign,” I told her. “Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. I…Jesus! I couldn’t…You were so happy, I didn’t want to alarm you.”

  “Well, I’m alarmed, okay? I’m extremely alarmed.” She crumpled the card and tossed it. “I don’t believe you. No one could be that stupid.” She put her hands to her head and said, “God! It’s always the same…” She fell back a step and glared at me bitterly. “You asshole!”

  “Ariel…” I reached out to her and she swung the cell phone, striking me hard on my temple. I stumbled sideways a step or two.

  “Keep away from me!” She shouted this with such force, it bent her nearly double, then threw the phone at me, hitting me in the chest. “Go away! Get out of here! Go!”

  I tried to explain myself again, but she wouldn’t hear me. She ran into the cabin, slammed the door. I heard the bolt slide shut. Dazed, I went to the door and called to her, but she refused to answer. I began to explain what had happened with Siskin. Loud music issued from behind the door, drowning me out. I pounded on the door, shouting her name. One of the windows was flung open; the barrel of our tranquilizer rifle protruded. She screamed at me, telling me to leave. I was so thoroughly stunned, unable to process what was going on, the rifle seemed like a joke. A bad one, but funny nonetheless. Why would she shoot? She knew she had nothing to fear from me. I moved toward the window, telling her to turn down the music so we could talk. The dart struck my right chest below my collarbone. I reeled backward, already feeling the effects. The dose each dart contained was designed to drop someone much bigger and stronger than myself, and as I staggered away from the cabin, trying for the car, I wondered if Ariel had killed me. My eyelids drooped. I felt nauseated and weak. I sank to my knees. There was a roaring in my ears that drowned out the music. A hot pressure on my skin. My field of vision shrank to a tunnel rimmed by fluttering black edges, a dwindling telescopic view, and I had a sense of slippage, as if I were sliding away inside myself, unable to grab hold of my thoughts, but trying to grab onto something. I remembered a phrase in an old blues song: “feeling funny in my mind…” For no reason I could fathom, it sparked a confidence that I would be all right and I lapsed into unconsciousness with a feeling of relief.

  IT WAS DARK when I waked. The first thing I noticed was a beetle crawling across the carpet of pine needles beside me—it was moving away from my face, a circumstance for which I was grateful, because I was too weak to brush it aside. The next thing that impinged on my consciousness was a reedy yet resonant voice speaking in a sibilant language, calling out to Ariel, begging her to listen. This confused me on several levels. Though my understanding was imperfect, I didn’t understand how it was I understood it at all, nor did I know who was speaking. It was essentially repeating what I had been saying to Ariel, and I thought I might be having a disassociative reaction and that I was the one speaking. But as my head cleared I realized the voice was coming from behind me. I managed to turn onto my back. Though the beetle had been in relatively sharp focus, this larger view of the world took a moment to align. Trees, cabin, sky…they whirled a few spins, settling into a tremulous stability. I saw no one else in the vicinity. Then the voice called out again and a pale spindly figure stepped around the corner of the cabin.

  At that distance, some thirty feet, I could not make out his face, but the extreme elongation of his limbs and his tight-fitting grayish-white suit—almost indistinguishable from the color of his skin—told me all I needed to know. The top of his head was level with the edge of the cabin roof. He paused by the door and hailed Ariel again. She answered in that same liquid, hissing language, telling him, as she had told me, to leave. And also, as with me, she called him “Isha.” He flung his left arm up in a gesture that, despite its inhumanly hinged articulation, I recognized as an emblem of frustration, and went pacing back and forth in front of the cabin, each stride carrying him almost a third of its width. Soon he broke off his pacing, returned to the door and after calling out to Ariel again, he kicked it in, an apparently minimal effort that blew it off its supports.

  Still groggy, until this point I’d been unable to gather what I was seeing into a frame, but as Isha disappeared inside the cabin, the urgency of the situation hit home. I struggled to my feet and caught a glimpse of a coffin-shaped lozenge of dark red metal standing off among the trees, its lid open to reveal a shallow concavity within. It seemed so out of place against the backdrop of spruce and pine, it stopped me for a moment. I swayed and blotches swam before my eyes. Ariel began to cry out in panic, each shriek stabbing into me, and I started toward the door, but before I had covered half the distance between the patch of ground where I had fallen and the cabin, Isha emerged with Ariel in tow. She screamed, clawed ineffectually at his hand, which engulfed her upper right arm. There was no time to go for a weapon. I threw myself in a shoulder block at his knees, thinking his joints would be a weakness. It was like tackling an iron bar—an iron bar that had the stench of a rotting carcass. I grasped an ankle, locked my other arm about his calf, but he flicked me off as easily as I might have dislodged a leg-humping terrier, sending me tumbling through the air. Blinky and shaken, lying crumpled on my side, I had an unobstructed view of his face. It was even uglier than those Ariel had drawn. Long hollow cheeks marked by vertical ridges—whether they were scars or some sensory apparatus, I cannot say. Eyes close together, almond-shaped surfaces concealed by membranes that appeared to have a yellowish crackling glaze. A scalp twigged with twists of black hair; a broad forehead and a tapered chin forming an inverted triangle that enclosed his features. The seat of his ugliness, however, was the area occupied by the mouth and nose. It appeared that something shaped like the base of a tripod had taken out a chunk of flesh, leaving tattered flaps of skin that only partly concealed a glistening mauve depth. The flaps palpitated as with an erratic gush of breath. The idea of his hands on Ariel sickened and enraged me. She screamed again. I picked myself up and charged Isha, eluded his defensive blow and jammed my fist into that central ugliness, into the glutinous heat of his throat. My fingers caught the flaps surrounding the maw as he jerked back his head. I clutched at them, tore at the loose skin. Letting out a high-pitched gurgling, he swatted me away. I went rolling on the ground and when I glanced up Isha was holding his mouth, blood leaking between nearly foot-long fingers that looked like dirty bones. Ariel had broken free and was running directly toward Isha’s vehicle, running full out, pumping her arms, her hair flying. Isha saw her, too, and I expect my sinking feeling mirrored his, for we both called after her at the same moment, our voices blending in a duet of pleading. It had no appreciable effect. She fitted herself into the vehicle, staring out at us; her hand went to a panel and the door began to swing shut.

  I think she looked at me before the door sealed her from view, and I later told myself that in her look was a measure of regret, of longing. But I know her mind was arrowing ahead to some distant landing where she would change and forget not only me, but everything she knew. That was, I believe now, the reason she buried the cylinders after arriving on our shore. She wanted surcease and only forgetfulness would bring it to her. And this time, once she succeeded in forgetting, she would find a safe harbor and there build a new life. Until Isha found her. The Isha of that place, alien in form and speech, doting, obsessed, mad fo
r her. I know this now, but at the time I knew only that she was gone beyond me.

  A roaring came to my ears. It seemed to arise from every surface, not the issue of one mouth but the consensus of a trillion. The nausea I was feeling doubled and redoubled in force, cramping me, and through slitted eyes I watched the forest ripple, the entire landscape rippling about the solid dark red object at its midst. Isha, I realized, had distanced himself from the vehicle. Trusting to his instincts, I made for the cabin, glancing back as I passed through the door. The vehicle appeared to be shrinking, receding into instability, still solid itself, but inset into an opaque turbulence that stretched tunnel-like into an unreal distance. Needles lifted from the ground, yet there was no wind to speak of and the motion of that airborne debris did not seem the product of a current, but a vibration I could not feel. Then I felt it. A hot pressure on my face—it was as if the molecules of the air had knitted together, forming a second, too-tight skin. Everything looked to have brightened. Metal glinted, rocks glowed. Even the darkness held a shine. The vehicle continued to dwindle, becoming no bigger than a red splinter at the heart of a vortex. My own heart felt the same size, drained of blood and warmth.

  I stopped just inside the cabin door. Isha was nowhere to be seen and this apparent sign of his caution convinced me to retreat deeper into the room; but I refused to turn away. I wanted to see the last of Ariel, to hold onto all of her I could for a while longer. The roaring rose in pitch and gradually thinned into a keening so intense, it kindled a fiery pinprick of pain in my skull. A supernal brightness infused the scene. The spruce trunks gleamed like burnished copper and their boughs had gone a solarized green. The shapes of things were distorted, elongated, like images painted on a fabric that was being stretched, indented by the receding ship, now reduced to a speck of redness at the center of a whirlpool of troubled air.

  I had an apprehension that something calamitous was about to happen; I raced into the bedroom and shut the door. As I stood there, thinking I had overreacted, I heard a sound: a snap not unlike the discharge of a static spark, yet somehow organic, almost like the slap of water against a pier and, though no louder than, say, the pop of a faulty speaker on a concert stage, frightening in that it seemed to issue from within my body. A pressure wave must have followed, for I wound up on the floor, my head jammed into the corner. Woozy, my mind curiously blank, but unhurt. Not a single ache or pain, as if instead of being flung into the corner, I had been displaced and set down in that awkward position. I sat up, had a look around and noticed that the bed stood closer to the wall than I remembered. And the framed photograph of sea stacks along the Oregon coast above the bed, I could have sworn it had been hung higher. And the door, the grain of the spruce planks that formed it had, I was certain, been sharper. Lying in bed, I had often contrived pictures of their patterns, Native American shapes, animals and ritual designs; now I could see nothing of the kind. Whether this remarked upon a change in my perceptions or in the room itself, I had no clue, but it made me wonder if my body, too, had changed, perhaps in some deleterious way. Then a clatter from the living room, as of furniture being knocked about, yanked me back into the moment. Isha, cheated of his quarry, was hunting me.

  Fear was sharp in me and I would have gone through the window, but the window was electronically locked and the punch code wouldn’t work. Maybe the circuitry, I thought, had undergone a change. The tranquilizer rifle was in the living room, where Ariel had left it. I searched about for a weapon and recalled the case, stored in the closet wall safe. I opened the closet, fumbled with the combination, hauled out the case, listening all the while to Isha wrecking the cabin on his way along the corridor. I removed Ariel’s gun from the case. Fifteen pounds of dull red metal. We had never tried to fire it and I had no confidence it could be fired, but I hoped it would discourage him.

  Either Isha was unfamiliar with doorknobs or else he considered them inappropriate—the door flew off its hinges with a splintering crash and toppled across the bed. He ducked his head in, spotted me and entered with a sinuous twisting movement that made my heart leap. I trained the gun at him, holding it in both hands, and squeezed the grip; but to no result. I squeezed a second time, exerting greater pressure, and when again nothing happened, Isha gave forth with a seething, spit-filled sound that I, in my fear, took for gloating laughter. He could have reached me in a single stride, but he remained standing inside the door. Though I had the thought that he might not want to kill me, it was swept aside by the menace of his physicality. The bloody maw and those cracked yellow eyes and his fingers—I imagined them ripping the cartilage of my throat. As I readjusted my hold on the gun in order to exert more pressure, my forefinger touched a soft depression in the metal and the weapon came alive with a throbbing. Perhaps Isha was blessed with extraordinarily acute senses and felt it, too, for he spoke then the only words I allowed him to speak, and though as I’ve said my comprehension of his language was imperfect, the gist of his message came through:

  “Brother,” he said. “This is all for nothing.”

  Only later did I consider that he might not have been asking for his life, but was making a more general statement, commenting upon our mutual futility or all futilities. The throbbing evolved into a hum and though there was no visible discharge, a fluid tremor passed through the metal and Isha, stretching out his hands, perhaps in entreaty, disintegrated. It was not an instantaneous event and bore some similarity to the process that had concentrated his vehicle into a speck, but was much quicker and less organized in its development. He flattened out against the backdrop of the cabin wall, curved inward as if an invisible ball had rolled into him, and then was ripped apart, a piecemeal dismembering, bits of flesh spraying, gouts of blood erupting, all borne backward against the wall, which itself began to disintegrate in the exact same fashion, blood and bone and wood and insulation blending into a flurry of pinkish dissolution. Horrified, I laid down the gun, but the process continued soundlessly for a grisly inch of time, devouring the living room, eroding the ground beneath it, carving a pit where what passed for our front yard had been, leaving me standing in the wreckage of my life, gazing out at darkness and the forest, less now by a few evergreens that also had been taken to wherever Isha had flown.

  The storm of those last minutes in the cabin blotted out every feeling other than fear, but as I sat on the edge of the pit afterward, numb and unreasoning, Ariel came back to me in the shape of a fiery absence, and the obsession from which love had sprung returned to stalk my brain, picking up the trail it had forsaken months before. Even in hopelessness, in the depths of loss, I clung to the fact that she was alive, and before long, before the sky paled and an actual light shone down to disperse the glowing too-real phantoms I created of the dark, my guilts and errors given nightmare form…from that fact I constructed a scheme to win her once again. I did not believe in it at first. It seemed a desperate fantasy whose sole product was false confidence; but in my derelict state, false confidence was my best resource, my one alternative to collapse.

  Toward eight o’clock a drizzle interrupted my mental struggle, driving me inside the ruin of the cabin. For ten or fifteen minutes I wandered about, touching Ariel’s things. A pen, a dress, a pill bottle, a lipstick. Touching them opened me to the exigencies of grief. I rejected grief, refused to let it own me, and turned to making lists, plotting strategies, testing theories against the newly acquired logics of my experience. And when I had exhausted this process, I went into the bedroom, opened Ariel’s case, removed a cylinder and began to complete my education.

  IF ONE ADOPTS a Buddhist platform, and lately this has seemed to me a reasonable stance, it becomes evident that life is compounded of mistakes, errors of omission and commission, that every worldly goal leads one deeper into the entanglements of illusion. Perhaps this was what Isha meant when he said that what we did was all for nothing. As the event of his death receded and grew more subject to analysis, I came to believe that he had not wanted to kill me and was mo
tivated by our natural affinity to confront me, and that I, in judging his actions, had made a mistake. Being aware of this and of the general truth underlying it was, of course, no guarantee that I would not continue to make mistakes, and so it was that ten days after Ariel fled into the multiverse, running from me, from Isha, from—I suspect—all Ishas everywhere, I set out walking toward Tuttle’s Hollow from a point on the highway southeast of Durbin, accompanied once again by Whirlie Henley. I had paid Henley an exorbitant amount for his services. He was not eager to go near the hollow, but had agreed to guide me to within six miles of it, to a streambed that would lead me to a point less than a hundred yards away.

  “There’s soldiers back in there, y’know,” he’d said as we sat over beer and whiskey at Mickey’s. “They always running people off. ‘Pears like they got ’bout a three, four mile perimeter. Get any closer and they know you there.”

  I said I was aware of the soldiers.

  “How you gon’ deal with ’em?” Henley asked.

  I told him it would be better for him if he remained ignorant of my business, and though he was disgruntled by this, after a brief bargaining session we agreed on a fee.

  I had spent much of the previous week in Los Angeles, hiding from Siskin—I assumed he had discovered the ruin of the cabin and would want to talk with me—and working with a hacker who, using the 1-212-AKHITAI phone number as a starting point, put together a detailed picture of the project in Tuttle’s Hollow. He had discovered that the project did not receive government funding—there were connections to the military, but these seemed unofficial, and the hacker’s opinion was that we were dealing with a private organization with friends in the military. Twenty-one personnel were on-site, twelve of them high-priced private security. Twelve was not sufficient to patrol such a large perimeter, but I assumed they could rapidly deploy whenever an intruder registered on their monitors.